New York Times Headlines

Bocchino is an artist worth noticing, not only by the art lovers but also by the graphic designers. What he does is really impressive and that's why he is recognized by the cultural and artistic community of different museums and galleries. His projects are driven by an analysis of the mass media as well as the processes of accumulation, archiving and record keeping. The project presented here is called New York Times Headlines, huge canvas with typography on which letters shape a geometric and colourful pattern of information. But what exactly is it all about? A.J. Bocchino collects headlines and corporate logos from the network for years and uses them as data for systems that generate complex drawings which demand endless hours of photocopying and downloading from the internet in order to reproduce the exact font and size of the existing headlines and logos. He has accumulated a huge mass of these photocopies and logos which he then organizes, catalogues, enters into a computer and color-codes. This is an ongoing project, that involves never-ending researching and adding more data, aiming to ultimately cover 100 years of 36,500 headlines. All the headlines are listed in chronological order and are color-coded. The use of typography in this project is like optimizing information that we are used to see on computer screens, like a code development, a language that is built in order to communicate something. Even though all information is setted in a "traditional" way, it comes out more like digitized information and maybe that's the point of the artist, a reference to the present era considering the past. It is amazing how many hours of research and execution this project demands, reminding us of good old times, when typography was all setting up by hand, using manual typesetting and ordering the letters according to orthography for visual display. It is not only a stunning art collection, but also an evidence related to history, that will be more and more apppreciated as the time goes by.